A cannabis farm was found in after a early-morning drugs raid on a house in Lytham Road.

Neighbours watched as eight officers smashed open the side gate with a battering ram and entered the house through an unlocked back window.

The first floor of the semi-detached house in Marshside had been converted into a makeshift cannabis factory, with three rooms filled with more than 200 plants, aged from a fortnight to two months.

“This is certainly not the first crop - it is quite well established,” Sergeant Neil Turner, leading the operation, said.

“The first point of call is to get the electricity made safe because it is on the fiddle and crudely done. They always blank the windows so people like neighbours or the window cleaner can’t see in and it keeps the heat in.”

Police said the electricity supply had been bypassed so the high amounts needed to power heaters and fans would not register on the meter.

The upstairs walls had been lined with foil to reflect the light from the heater lamps hung low from the ceiling. Two standing fans in each room kept the air flowing around the plants that were lined in neat rows.

A board of six home-made double plug sockets hung in a mass of wiring from the ceiling of each room to accommodate all the lamps and fans.

A water barrel in the bathroom held nutrients that were fed to the plants by a hose.

A member of CID said: “This is a good size farm. It would have taken weeks to set up and then a couple of months before you can get a return. We have got experts who can say how old the plants are and what sort of financial yield they would bring. They have gone to this much trouble and they wouldn’t do this if they weren’t getting a good yield.”

An Asian man in his 20s was found in a sleeping bag in the house. He was arrested on suspicion of cultivation of cannabis and theft of electricity.

He appeared to have been living in the front room, while the back room was filled with empty fertilizer bottles and 18 bin sacks of cultivation waste - the parts of the plants that are not sold.